Chapter One

Called Home

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop
convenience market. It was our family’s last day in
Arizona, where I’d lived half my life and raised two
kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away
forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we
would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner
built a nest and fed lizards to her weird-looking
babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride a
bike; the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake.
Our driveway was just the first tributary on a memory
river sweeping us out.

One person’s picture postcard is someone else’s normal.
This was the landscape whose every face we knew: giant
saguaro cacti, coyotes, mountains, the wicked sun
reflecting off bare gravel. We were leaving it now in
one of its uglier moments, which made good-bye easier,
but also seemed like a cheap shot-like ending a romance
right when your partner has really bad bed hair. The
desert that day looked like a nasty case of prickly heat
caught in a long, naked wince.

This was the end of May. Our rainfall since Thanksgiving
had measured less than one inch. The cacti, denizens of
deprivation, looked ready to pull up roots and hitch a
ride out if they could. The prickly pears waved good-bye
with puckered, grayish pads. The tall, dehydrated
saguaros stood around all teetery and sucked-in like
very prickly supermodels. Even in the best of times
desert creatures live on the edge of survival, getting
by mostly on vapor and their own life savings. Now, as
the southern tier of U.S. states came into a third
consecutive year of drought, people elsewhere debated
how seriously they should take global warming. We were
staring it in the face.

Away went our little family, like rats leaping off the
burning ship. It hurt to think about everything at once:
our friends, our desert, old home, new home. We felt
giddy and tragic as we pulled up at a little gas-and-go
market on the outside edge of Tucson. Before we set off
to seek our fortunes we had to gas up, of course, and
buy snacks for the road. We did have a cooler in the
back seat packed with respectable lunch fare. But we had
more than two thousand miles to go. Before we crossed a
few state lines we’d need to give our car a salt
treatment and indulge in some things that go crunch.

This was the trip of our lives. We were ending our
existence outside the city limits of Tucson, Arizona, to
begin a rural one in southern Appalachia. We’d sold our
house and stuffed the car with the most crucial things:
birth certificates, books-on-tape, and a dog on drugs.
(Just for the trip, I swear.) All other stuff would come
in the moving van. For better or worse, we would soon be
living on a farm.

For twenty years Steven had owned a piece of land in the
southern Appalachians with a farmhouse, barn, orchards
and fields, and a tax zoning known as “farm use.” He was
living there when I met him, teaching college and fixing
up his old house one salvaged window at a time. I’d come
as a visiting writer, recently divorced, with something
of a fixer-upper life. We proceeded to wreck our agendas
in the predictable fashion by falling in love. My young
daughter and I were attached to our community in Tucson;
Steven was just as attached to his own green pastures
and the birdsong chorus of deciduous eastern woodlands.
My father-in-law to be, upon hearing the exciting news
about us, asked Steven, “Couldn’t you find one closer?”

Apparently not. We held on to the farm by renting the
farmhouse to another family, and maintained marital
happiness by migrating like birds: for the school year
we lived in Tucson, but every summer headed back to our
rich foraging grounds, the farm. For three months a year
we lived in a tiny, extremely crooked log cabin in the
woods behind the farmhouse, listening to wood thrushes,
growing our own food. The girls (for another child came
along shortly) loved playing in the creek, catching
turtles, experiencing real mud. I liked working the
land, and increasingly came to think of this place as my
home too. When all of us were ready, we decided, we’d go
there for keeps.

We had many conventional reasons for relocation,
including extended family. My Kingsolver ancestors came
from that county in Virginia; I’d grown up only a few
hours away, over the Kentucky line. Returning now would
allow my kids more than just a hit-and-run, holiday
acquaintance with grandparents and cousins. In my adult
life I’d hardly shared a phone book with anyone else
using my last name. Now I could spend Memorial Day
decorating my ancestors’ graves with peonies from my
backyard. Tucson had opened my eyes to the world and
given me a writing career, legions of friends, and a
taste for the sensory extravagance of red hot chiles and
five-alarm sunsets. But after twenty-five years in the
desert, I’d been called home.

There is another reason the move felt right to us, and
it’s the purview of this book. We wanted to live in a
place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow,
and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground.
This might seem an abstract reason for leaving beloved
friends and one of the most idyllic destination cities
in the United States. But it was real to us. As it
closes in on the million-souls mark, Tucson’s charms
have made it one of this country’s fastest-growing
cities. It keeps its people serviced across the wide,
wide spectrum of daily human wants, with its banks,
shops, symphonies, colleges, art galleries, city parks,
and more golf courses than you can shake a stick at. By
all accounts …

More in Entertainment

Thanks to the donations of thousands of dollars and free tickets, Denver-area kids are emerging from theaters energized by the blockbuster movie "The Black Panther" and insisting they also learned things they can apply in the classroom and life.